Tom Kim

As we approach a new century, the Web continues its phenomenal growth rate, appealing in so many ways to diverse groups of people. With the maturation of Java, the Web will evolve from stateless HTML pages or cobbled-together HTML/CGI script solutions to true interactivity and context sensitivity. I have heard this next stage referred to as "the second Web." To target the second Web, many people - application development tools vendors in particular - have concluded that traditional 2-tier, client/server architectures will not scale well because of the unpredictable number of user connections and data access and system administration issues. To address the limitations of 2-tier architectures, many development groups are moving to 3-tier architectures. This is roughly defined as a presentation layer at the client tier, a server in the middle and a database of some sort ... (more)